Sins of the Father
by Bekkoni
Summary: A new villan emerges with very close ties to one of the founding members.
1. Baltimore

The battle had been raging on for almost four hours. All across Baltimore, computers had suddenly began sending streams of instructions and computations out. And then, in a secure lab a mile from the city, something had been activated.

"What is this again?" Flash asked over the comlink.

"An experimental robot built using Amazo technology," Batman said, as he armed the batplane and prepared to fly it at the nearly two-story tall machine. "Artificial Intelligence, regenerative technology, the whole package."

"Great," Superman said, appearing outside the cockpit window. "Don't these scientists realize using a villain's technology might be bad?"

Bruce shrugged and pressed the joystick control forward. The supersonic engine overrode the jet one and the plane flew forward in a sudden burst of speed, passing Superman for a minute.

**********

The missile slammed into the robot's chest. It reared its silver head and keened a high octave cry that shattered every window within a half-mile radius.

"What does it want?" Green Lantern said to himself, trying to contain it with a web of emerald light.

"Judging by the fact that it is trying quite hard to remove the wall from that bank, money I presume," Batman pushed his plane into a nosedive and pulled up at the last minute, taking a plate off the robot's scalp.

"Yes, I know," Green Lantern sighed. "But it's a robot; it can't exactly walk into Wal-Mart and pick up a gallon of Cookies n' Crème. What does it need cash for?"

Batman was hovering above a cloud bank now, looking down on the wrecked Baltimore skyline. "Not it, it's master. I'm triangulating the source now."

"Hurry up," Diana said. She tore an arm off the machine and watched it regrow in two seconds flat. "It's taking this city apart."

Batman traced the radio signals in the area. "This should show me…damn!"

"What?" Shayera threw her mace through the thing's left eye.

"The person controlling the robot has sent a program into every computer in the Baltimore area. He or she is using the combined computing power of all those machines to write bits of the programs then knit them together."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it's almost impossible to trace the origin signal."

"Cadmus?" Superman asked, an image of Amanda Waller appearing in his mind.

"No. That's got a very different signature, and they're defunct anyway." Batman typed a few commands into the onboard computer. "There. The mother signal is originating from an address on Fourth Street. I'll go there, you guys keep that thing busy."

"Aye, aye, Captain," Flash muttered as the black jet streaked away, headed downtown.

*******************

The address led him to a salty warehouse district on the bay. Mold crept over the streets, and rusted metal lay in dangerously-stacked piles. The only living things he could see were the rats.

It was so classic villain that it was almost cliché.

Batman kept his scanner out in front of him and followed the trail of radio signatures to an especially decrepit warehouse that smelled like bad fish.

He pulled himself through a window and edged along an I-beam in the ceiling. Down below a man in a black ski mask was instructing another three thugs. The masked on held a laptop that had been pried open. Numerous wires criss-crossed the surface and laced with extra memory cartridges and such.

Definitely the ringleader.

The four thugs walked out of the main room and down a hallway. Batman followed in the shadows and took them out silently.

"Gotham's famous Dark Knight," said a voice from behind him. He turned and threw a batarang in a single fluid motion.

The masked figure twisted away and let the weapon hit the wall barely an inch from his face.

Batman tossed two more, inches apart. The man had nowhere to go. The batarang on his left side caught the fabric of his mask and ripped it away, exposing the face underneath.

Hard blue eyes and a wicked grin. Batman paused for just a moment.

Something hard and metal hit him in the back of the head. He blacked out just before the warehouse exploded.


	2. Chapter 2

"I know what I saw."

"Bruce…" Superman said carefully, leaning against one of the stalagmites in the Batcave. "You got hit in the head pretty hard."

"I _know _what I saw."

"It was twenty-some years ago. People can change in appearance a lot in that time."

Batman turned to him. His cowl covered the white bandage that protected the stitches on the back of his head, but Clark could still see them with his x-ray vision. "I think we can both agree that I wouldn't just forget his face."

"Yes, but…"

Bruce put a photo into a scanner and let the computer digitalize it. He hit a few keys, and Clark watched the picture morph from a middle-aged man to an older one.

"It's the software they use on those missing-child posters," Batman explained. The face stopped changing. Bruce pointed to it. "That's what I saw, Clark. Almost exactly."

"He stole government property and hacked into the whole city."

"I know." Bruce looked like he was about to say something else, paused, and instead opened another file on the computer. It was a newspaper article from that day, with the headline TWO DEAD IN MYSTERY MURDER. "He's a killer, too."

Clark bit his lip. "How do you know he did it?"

"A small bit of Amazo residue was found on their skin," Bruce clicked the red X and the article vanished from the screen. "Both were computer experts. He probably got information from them then killed them."

"You seem to be taking this extremely well." The cave was cold, but Batman didn't shiver.

"Should I not be?"

"Let me rephrase—you seem to be taking this _too_ well."

Bruce sighed, looked at his hands, the screen, not at Clark. "It's been twenty years. There's a good chance it's a look-alike or a clone or something."

"And?" Clark asked.

"If he didn't die—"

"Then why didn't he come?"

"Yes," Batman said.

A red blur appeared in front of the monitor.

"Hiya," said Flash. "Figure out who the perp is?"

Diana followed close behind. "Alfred wasn't at the door," she said.

Bruce brought up the face for them. "Alfred's in England," he said. "His aunt's ill."

"I didn't know Alfred had an aunt," Diana mused, before examining the face. She frowned at the man on the screen. "Does he have a name?"

Batman said nothing.

"Bruce?"

"He's my father."


	3. DNA

**A/N: Nikki! No more reading this! Really!! There's a reason I have a pen name, and its not so you can find me more easily! (and that means Audrey, too)**

******************

It was two weeks before the hacker showed up again.

The Hacker.

That's what he was called in all the official reports. Clark glanced over at Bruce sitting on the other side of the monitor room and knew he was hoping that "Thomas Wayne" was a clone, or a partial DNA hybrid, or a simple look-alike.

Too bad that in their line of work, "simple" never occurred.

"We have a mutating computer virus in Chicago," Batman said. "The signature matches The Hacker's."

"He's making it easy for us."

"No, he wants us to come."

When Clark looked up to reply, the room was empty save for Bruce's chair, still spinning in lazy rounds.

*******************************************

They traced the virus to a university computer lab. Diana and Flash were battling the effects--small creatures made of computer bytes that were disintegrating the city into energy. Except for cash. That they bagged up and vanished with.

"I'm going," Batman said, in full Dark Knight mode.

"I'll come with you," ordinarily, Batman would have accept the help of a green lantern, but today…this was something he had to find out for himself.

"No, John."

"Yes."

Clark gave him a Look that said 'this is not worth fighting over'. "C'mon Bruce."

"Fine," the dark knight muttered, "but no getting in my way."

*************************************************

The hacker was standing in a room at the top of one of the city's apartment complexes, connected to a sort of biometric computer system. He was the directing the spread of the virus with a wave of his hand.

"Drop that controller," Batman snarled, batarang at ready. The man turned slowly, and Bruce flinched inwardly at the sight of his father's lookalike.

"Gotham's defender," the man drawled. "Come to that another crack at it?"

"Come to stop you," GL appeared from the doorway of and slashed through the computer's monitor.

The hacker drew two knives from under his jacket and severed a wire above his head. The sparks flew around the room and Batman ducked the wire. It hit GL with 600 volts and he fell, unconscious. The hacker took advantage of his pause and dove at him.

Bruce fell back. The man was heavier than he had expected. He sliced through one of the man's sleeves with the batarang as they tussled on the floor.

"You know, I have a son in Gotham," the hacker said.

The room turned cold.

"He doesn't know I'm alive," said the hacker, managing to land a punch to Bruce's ribs. "From what I hear now, he's a vapid slacker now."

"Maybe you should have raised him better."

"Ha," the hacker drove an elbow into Bruce's side. His whole body went numb.

"Used to be a surgeon," the man said. "That nerve I just hit constricts the electrical impulses from your brain. Can't move, can you?"

The hacker ran from the room.

***************************************************

After an excruciating ten minutes, batman could sit up. He pulled something from his pocket.

GL was just waking up. "What's that?"

Bruce smeared something from the batarang he was holding onto a slide and stuck it into the machine.

"Well?"

"It's a DNA analyzer," Bruce said quietly.

"And?"

"His DNA matches mine. He really is my father."


	4. Face to Face

Thomas Wayne drove past the manor that had once been his. He hardly thought of himself as that man anymore. He had had so many other names in the twenty-six years since Thomas had perished from a mugger's bullet.

No one could be glimpsed in the front windows. From what Thomas had read of his son, Bruce was probably gallivanting off at some party with a woman or two at his side.

And Alfred—how old would he be now? Sixty? Seventy? Thomas couldn't recall ever hearing his age.

He drove on.

A worn metal sign greeted him ten more miles down the road. _Welcome to Gotham City. _The "Gotham" had been crossed out with red spray paint and replaced with "Hell".

Hell City. Right enough. There had been a time when Thomas had tried to revive the old maiden, even when she fought him with her knives and her guns.

Thomas Wayne was dead. Now, the man had returned, and the city would soon be his.

***********************************************

"I'm getting reports of major electrical discharges in the east end," Robin said, perched by the Batcomputer.

"Just a blackout, or something else?" Batman tried to keep the anticipation out of his voice.

"It's going on and off—almost like a pattern, but I can't tell if-"

Batman jumped over and looked at the screen. On a map, the electricity showed up as blue spurts. There was a four-second burst, then two, then another two—

_Long, short, s hort._

It was Morse code.

The message read: To the Batman. I have control of the city's electricity. 566 Westward Drive. Round Three.

_Round Three._ The mocking tone was not lost on Bruce.

He turned swiftly and buckled into the Batmobile. Robin hopped in as well.

"You're staying."

"Why?" Tim looked at him. "What is wrong with you lately?"

"Get. Out."

That was a tone that meant he was not to be messed with. Robin did what he was told and sulked off to the monitor hub.

***************************************

566 Westward Drive was a vacant apartment building in the crumbling east end. A sign, graffiti-splattered, noted that the building was due to be demolished in three days. Batman burst through the fifth floor window.

Silver shapes shot from the walls and clung to him, digging their sharp spikes through the Kevlar. He dug a batarang through one and sparks flew.

The robot horde dragged him into another room. There were at least a hundred. He took out twenty in five minutes, but more appeared.

The Hacker stood at the back of the hall. He hadn't bothered with a mask. Behind him, electricity crackled over a web of copper wiring. Beyond, in the window, the city lay dark.

"What do you want?" Bruce asked, shorting out ten more bots with a charged blast.

The man smiled. "To kill you."

"Why?"

"You are what keeps Gotham stumbling on, year after year. Without is protector, it is a helpless infant. I can raze it and begin again." For an instant his expression changed, "Truly, it is the city I want to kill."

One of the robots succeeded in tearing a two-inch long gash through Batman's armor. He felt the blood drip down his sleeve.

"This city," The man said, spitting out the words, "This _city_ you love so dearly took my life from me."

Bruce felt his pulse quicken; it had nothing to do with the battle.

"One night—how long ago? Too long…a man shot my wife. He shot me too, and they put me in a bag and called me dead."

A metal claw tore open a pocket on his belt. Vials of chemicals dropped to the floor and were crushed by the robots' limbs. The liquid pooled and flowed closer to the Hacker and his electrical array.

"Then I woke up, left, and they were so _scared_, scared of what would happen when it was found that they'd lost a body. They cremated another man and I was dead, but I lived."

His speech was fractured and rambling. He was mad—shattered by the same event that had created his son.

The robots, weighing at least two hundred pounds each, pinned Batman to the floor. Thomas Wayne stepped over him, and they were face to face for the first time in two decades.

"Let's see who you are," he touched the cowl and it shocked him. "Nasty little trick."

He put something up to Bruce's face. It was cold and hard. There was a click, and pain shot from his head to his feet. He struggled, and the robots held him tiger. Their claws cut him in fifty man ripped off his mask, stepped back.

"Hello, dad," it hurt to talk, a couple of his ribs had probably been broken by the shock and his nose was bleeding. But he could still see the look on the hacker--_his father's_—face.

The chemicals that had been spilled reached the charged wires.

Before Thomas Wayne could react to the face beneath the mask, the room around them exploded, and they were falling, falling, falling through the floor. Fire raged, eating the walls and each floor beneath.

Bruce, free of the robots that smoldered below, shot a grappling hook up to the ceiling, pulled on his mask, and caught Thomas. The elder Wayne was unconscious, knocked out by a falling beam.

Outside, the night was cold. Batman called the Watchtower and said there was one criminal to be taken to their security cells.


	5. Family Matter

"You haven't booked him yet?!" Batman said.

"I thought you would want to do it," Superman handed him a blank form, to fill out with the prisoner's information. Usually extremely problematic villains were held in special cells on the Watchtower until a prison could customize their facility to control the inmate's abilities.

Batman just looked at him for a minute, and finally snarled, "Wipe that innocent stare off your face, Kent, or I'll deck you, and I don't care if I break my damn hand doing it."

Clark backed up a few feet. When he was a sufficient distance away, he said. "Bruce, he's your _father._"

"I suppose you're right," Batman looked defeated. Superman considered asking him if he was okay, but he would probably be met with a bitter snarl, so he let it go.

Bruce walked away, in the direction of the cells.

************************************

"You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do can and will be used against you in a court of—"

"I know my rights, Bruce," Thomas, in his orange suit, sat almost carelessly in the metal chair at the other end of the table. "And I don't think you're a police officer."

"I passed the exams," Batman snapped. "I think I can handle reading a piece of paper to you and making you sign it."

"Very well, then."

They finished with that and Batman picked up the next form. There was a pitcher of water on this side of the Plexiglas wall. He poured himself a glass, took a sip, and wished it was vodka instead. It was one of the very few times in his life when he could remember feeling like he needed a drink.

"Name," he asked.

"Well, I'd hope you haven't forgotten your own fathe—"

"_Name?"_

Thomas smiled. "Why don't you run my prints and see?"

Begrudgingly, Batman found the ink-stained card in his stack of papers (at least Clark had done that) and ran it through the monitor room's computer.

Names began popping up like mad.

Evan Christini. Jacob Donahugh. Robert T. Tilldae. Jameson Smith. Christopher North.

And those were just the top few.

Flash came up behind him. "What are those?"

"Aliases."

Flash read whose fingerprints they were and gave a small chuckle. "Like father like so—"

"_Don't say it."_

Flash jumped at the tone of Batman's voice and fled. Bruce continued to read the information.

The record spanned twenty years and nineteen countries. For almost every name, there was a criminal charge attached.

Most of them were first-degree murder. Of gangsters, mafia heads, businessmen who Bruce knew were corrupt. Occasionally, there was a cop.

He snatched the list from the printer and went back to the cells.

"You're a murderer."

Thomas didn't look away. "These people deserve to live? How many have they killed? I'd say it was public service."

"The cops?"

"They got in the way."

For a minute, Bruce had to hold on to the table to stop himself from crashing through the glass, putting his hands around that man's neck and just not letting go until he passed out from the lack of oxygen…

He collected himself and said, strained, "My father would not do that."

"You want proof?" Thomas reached into the pocket on his jumpsuit and pulled out a piece of paper. He pushed it through the small slit in the glass.

"I thought they searched you."

"The one in blue thought it was harmless."

Against his better judgment, Batman picked it up. It was faded, but he recognized it—a ticket stub from the Gotham Plaza for The Return of Zorro. He turned it over carefully. There was a blue stain on the back, from when his eight-year-old self had dropped it accidentally on someone else's used gum.

He resisted the urge to tear it to pieces.

"You were a surgeon. You saved people's lives."

"Do you think this is the answer?" Thomas snapped. "I read the papers--if you had killed the Joker years ago, how many lives would you have saved? I have saved hundreds by killing those who have no regard for others. And I do it without dressing up like a flying rodent."

"Mom would have never let you do this."

Thomas leaned forward, until his face was almost touching the wall that separated him from his son. "Your mother is dead. She was killed because no one had the nerve to do what had to be done."

"She died because someone put a gun into a stoned punk's hands."

"His name was Joseph Chill," Thomas said, leaning back a little. "He had killed five others in gang turf wars and botched robberies before. He was released each time after serving only a year or two. I tracked him down in Latin America and ended it."

When Bruce said nothing, he added one more sentence. "What would you have done, had you found him?"

Batman got up, knocking down his chair, and left without a second glance.


	6. Never

Immediately after the conversation with his father, Bruce had gone down to the hologram-chamber, turned off all the safety protocols, and set the training level to the highest it would go for a human.

Then he let loose on the holographic Luthor, Cheetah, Shade, and all the other villains the computer had in its database. He barely thought about what he was doing, and just did. The holograms fell and vanished, to be replaced by another doppelganger.

He wasn't sure how long he had been there—at least an hour, two, maybe even more than two—when the program froze. He whirled around.

Clark was standing at the control panel.

"Turn it back on," Batman said.

Clark shook his head and kept his hand over the buttons. "We have to talk."

"No, we don't."

"I saw the video tape. I don't know what was said, but—"

"But what?" Bruce snapped. "Now you feel bad for me because my father is insane and a villain and the antithesis of everything I've worked for? Or are you just doing your Boy Scout duty? Go away, Clark, I can handle this by myself, you know I always hav—"

He broke off abruptly and bit his lip. Superman looked at him closer, and he saw the almost imperceptible switch in Clark's eyes when he went over to x-ray vision.

"Bruce," Clark said, softly, "Are you _crying_?"

Batman turned away to hide the tears and crossed his arms over his chest. "No."

Clark reached over and gently tugged the mask off his face. "Sure looks like it to me." He knew better than to try and hug Bruce, but he took a tissue out of his pocket and handed it to him. Then he waited until Batman had collected himself (enough so that he wouldn't storm off at Clark's next words).

"This isn't just about him being evil, is it?"

Bruce looked at him. His eyes were slightly red-rimmed, but he still made Clark uncomfortable under his gaze.

"I mean…he's alive. I think, that if him being evil was the only thing bothering you, you'd still be happy. You wouldn't be this upset."

"Your reading too much into this," his voice was too gruff.

"Really?" Superman asked.

Batman gave a strong nod.

Clark waited a few more beats, but Bruce said nothing. Superman turned to leave.

He was almost at the door when he heard Bruce say something.

"…he never came home…"

Bruce still had his arms crossed, and at that moment he looked much younger and much more vulnerable than he ever had in the suit before. His voice was quiet. "He could have come back, and he never did. He left me alone."

"Dammit," Suddenly, he swung at the frozen Firefly hologram. His fist stopped inches from the projection, and he lowered it again. His shoulders slumped. "I used to try so hard to be perfect for him, be just like him. And he didn't love me enough to come home."

He was biting down on his lip so hard it bled.

Clark tentatively put his arm around him.

"Was his vendetta more important than his son?" This was the first he had cried in a long time.

Superman was going to say something, when a high-pitched _Beeo-eep!_ echoed through the chamber. A red light on the wall flashed.

"What's that?" Clark asked.

Batman pulled his mask back on and ran out the door. There was a look on his face that Clark had never seen before. "Prisoner escape alarm."

***********************************************

It was two a.m. Only fourteen JLA members were on the Watchtower. Batman knew the exact position of each. The person below him was not in the right place.

He dropped down from the ceiling and grabbed them. The man yelped.

It was Booster Gold in his casual costume.

"Where's your comlink?" Batman growled.

"I don't know…I was just trying to find the prisoner—that's okay, right? I forgot it—"

Batman checked his tracking device. One of the red dots was headed to the transporter room. He ran towards it.

In the hall up ahead, the door was just closing, he checked—it was him, all right.

The doors to the transporter room hissed open.

It was empty. Bruce checked again, the comlink was definitely in this room.

Something scuttled by his foot. He looked down and saw a rat with Booster's comlink tied around its neck.

"Pick it up," a voice came over the device. Batman hesitated, then reached down.

"Is this what you have chosen? To be a so-called superhero?"

It was his father's voice. He tried to trace the signal. "I wouldn't say I'm that."

"But you refuse to do what is necessary."

"Killing is _never_ necessary!" Batman said, "And mark my words, when I find you, you are not escaping from that cell again. I will make sure of it. You may be Thomas Wayne, but you are nothing like my father."

"Then you are no son of mine." This time the voice didn't come from over the comlink, but from directly behind him. He dropped the radio and turned around.

Thomas Wayne had a gun, and he pulled the trigger twice.


	7. Breakdown

"He shot me."

Shayera looked at Green Lantern, who looked at Flash, who looked at Diana, who gently elbowed Superman.

"Bruce…"Clark started, and faltered.

"He _shot_ me. Twice."

They were all standing around the medical bay bed. Bruce was lying on it, staring up at the ceiling. There were bandages wrapped around his lower chest.

"Well, he missed you once," Flash said, and Shayera stomped on his foot.

Bruce kept staring up blankly. He had actually stayed in the med bay for more than an hour, which was very disturbing. Even worse was the fact that he seemed to be taking J'onn's advice to take it easy.

"My own father," he kept repeating, in the same hollow tone.

Superman sat down next to him. "You want to catch him, though, don't you?"

"What's the point?"

Green Lantern almost fell over.

"He'll just get out again. Or vanish. Or kill someone. They all do." He wasn't really talking to them, but instead just conversing with the empty air.

Clark took a deep breath. "Every time you put, say, the Joker behind bars, its more time he doesn't have to create mayhem and murder."

"The Joker?" Bruce said, distantly, like he'd truly forgotten. "He didn't come until I did. He's my fault. Just another monster I created."

"The Joker is _not_ your fault," Clark said, as firmly as he could.

Bruce laughed quietly and darkly. "And what if he is? Maybe they all are. There's no way we can ever win this, Clark. People will just kept dying and stealing, and it never ends. It never—"

Flash could take no more. He leapt over Clark, grabbed Bruce by the hands, and dragged him onto his feet, all in the space of a breath.

"You are not going to do this!" He yelled, waving his hand at Bruce. "You're the goddamn Batman for crying out loud! You are not going to break down and stay there like some kind of invalid. You are going to get up, get dressed, and go catch the guy. It doesn't matter if it's your father, no father would ever shoot their kid. Go get him! That's what you do! Don't make me slap you, darn it, because I will!"

There was dead silence. Superman looked stunned. Bruce blinked. Wally brought his hand up.

Batman glared at him. "You realize that if you actually hit me then you'll be asking me to kill you."

Flash beamed. "I could hug you right now."

"And then you'd _wish_ you were dead." Bruce grabbed his costume from off the end of the bed, slipped it on, and turned around.

"All of you stay here," he said. "This is my fight, and I'm taking him down."

He walked out of the med bay.

Green Lantern turned to Flash. "I thought for sure he was going to kill you."

Wally smiled.

* * *

In a warehouse in Gotham, Thomas waited. He waited for his son to arrive for the final battle. It wouldn't take long—Bruce was trained well.

Soon, he would be found, and then the Reckoning would begin. They would fight, one would win. It was to be the last time they played this game.

It would end here, in the streets of the city that had created them both.

**Next up--the final chapter.**


	8. Finale

**A/N: Oka, this is the finale chapter. Sorry it took so long to post, but I was occupied with other things. Enjoy, and please (please!!) review!**

Bruce knew where he was. It would only be fitting. Their last fight would take place in the street where the Batman had been born.

I was fitting, yes. Symbolic. Part of him wished he didn't have to do this, that he could just let Thomas (he thought of him as Thomas—or tried to—the word _father_ stuck in his throat). It was predictable as well.

Yes, predictable. Like a criminal. Think of him as a villain.

He closed his eyes for a moment, getting a hold of himself, and swooped off into the darkness.

***************************************************

Thomas could sense him coming. Oh, yes, the Batman was near.

He knew that this place would be easy to find. He _wanted_ it to be easy. Thomas wasn't stupid. He knew that Bruce would find him, where ever he was.

The point was to be ready.

He heard a cape swish behind him, and smiled.

***************************************************

Batman landed softly behind Thomas. The older man spun around, in the process aiming some sort of energy weapon and firing in. Batman jerked to the side. The bottom edge of his cape smoked.

"You think that you will be able to catch me?" Thomas asked, smirking. "You failed twice. This is one thing the great Batman won't accomplish."

"Third time's the charm," Bruce said, leaping at him , and inflicting a long cut with the edge of a batarang.

"You know why you will fail?" Thomas said, "It's because you aren't a legend to me. You're just a weak, mortal man, and my son at that."

Bruce dodged another shot, swung a Thomas with a katcha-yu strike. The older man blocked it easily. Apparently he had learned some new tricks.

"But you…"Thomas continued. "Every man fears his father."

They were plunged into darkness as a cloud passed over the moon. Bruce realized suddenly he had the cowl he wore in the Watchtower on, the one without night vision capabilities. He heard a step to the left and dove that way, fist connecting with something. Thomas grunted at the blow, and vanished again into the darkness.

"My father is dead," Bruce said, "He died in this alley."

"He was born in this alley."

For a moment, Bruce could almost see in the disembodied voice a Christmas of many years ago, with the three of them seated around the fire, Alfred with eggnog and cookies…

The bullet glanced off his side, not cutting through the Kevlar, but he knew there would be a bruise in the morning.

Something shifted behind him, he spun and lashed out before Thomas could react, catching him in the jaw with a round-kick.

Thomas fell, and before he could so much as twitch, Bruce was on top of him, holding him down.

All Batman could see was his hands around Thomas' neck. It would be so easy, just a little harder, and this would be over. Just a little more and his father would be dead again…Thomas Wayne would once again be a surgeon from a time forgotten whose greatest joy was saving lives.

Thomas Wayne wouldn't be a monster.

The man under him laughed, dark, hard laughter.

"Go on," he whispered, though Bruce might have imagined it, he couldn't be sure, it was so _soft_.

His grip slackened, slightly.

The knee into his chest surprised him, robbing him of breath. He felt a rib crack.

Now Batman (no, Bruce, this was Bruce's fight, wasn't it, not Batman's, the Batman had vanished), was the one pinned to the ground.

A face emerged from the darkness. They were both wet from rolling in the puddles and muck, Thomas had a smear of mud below his eye. It reminded Bruce of the time he had come home, still bloodstained, after a patient had died in on the table.

"You won't fight me, not truly," Thomas said, as the clouds opened up and poured their bitter tears onto this scene that no one else would see. "You cannot win and it's making you crazy. You're falling apart."

Bruce drove an elbow into Thomas' ribs and leapt up. They wrestled, slipping on the wet cobblestones and picking themselves back up. The flashes of lightning lent a strobe-light effect to the fight, making it unreal, like Bruce had fallen through the rabbit hole to a twisted Wonderland.

_Alice in Wonderland_. That had been his favorite book, before. Dad would read a chapter a night, and after they finished the first, they'd moved on to _Through the Looking Glass. _They never had the chance to finish that one.

"You're _distracted._" Thomas said, when Bruce narrowly ducked a clumsy sucker punch. "I expected better of my son. Silly of me to believe a boy without a proper upbringing could do anything but disappoint."

Something snapped. Bruce grabbed Thomas's jacket with both hands, and no amount of blows would shake him off this time.

"You _abandoned_ me," he snarled, slamming Thomas once, twice against the brick wall, and throwing him into a tower of garbage cans. "Alfred was a better father than you ever were, even before you left. You cared more about your hospital than you did about your son."

Thomas staggered to his feet and smiled. Blood trailed from his nose down his chin. He took something from his inside his jacket (a gun, Bruce thought, but he wasn't thinking enough to think of disarming, all he could see was that _face_).

Thomas aimed and shot. The crack of the gun brought it all back (the cinema, the man, the sirens, all of it, it was just the same). Bruce dodged the shot at the last second, and grabbed Thomas around the neck.

"No," he said, "No more."

And they both knew it was over.

Thomas nodded, and gave the smallest of smiles. "Yes," he said, quietly, serenely, "No more."

And he fell, lifeless, into his son's arms.

****************************************************

"Cyanide," J'onn said the next day, "hidden in a fake tooth. All he had to do was bite down."

Bruce nodded silently.

Diana put her hand on his shoulder. "Are you okay?"

He looked at her for a moment as if he didn't know who she was, then snapped back. He gently but firmly removed her hand and lifted the cowl back over his face.

"I'm fine," Batman said, and turned to leave.

"Where do you think you're going?" John said, positioning himself in front of the door.

"Patrolling. I'm late," Batman brushed him aside easily. "One more thing—I don't want him buried as Thomas Wayne. I don't care what he's called, but my father is long dead."

And with that, he left.

---End---


End file.
